(4) 25 Mar 94 01:56:00 Sent: Sat 26 Mar 0:26
By: Adam Sterling
To: Glenda Stocks
Re: Francesca
St: Rcvd Sent In transit
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: 11:13 pm Tue Mar 1, 1994 Number : 25 of 41
From: Francesca Thoman Base : Dreams,Pastlives & Reincar
To : All Refer #: None
Subj: The Next Ten Years Replies: None
Stat: Sent Origin : 03-01-94 21:04
OBEHON IN "SPIRIT SPEAKS" MAGAZINE
(c) 1993 FRANCESCA THOMAN
FOR ELECTRONIC DISTRIBUTION ONLY
ALL OTHER RIGHTS RESERVED
THE NEXT TEN YEARS
I'm going to disappoint some people: I won't give many
specific predictions for the next ten years. One reason is
because for the next three decades, not just the next ten years,
there will be profound changes in the way you perceive the
process of cause and effect. When your perceptions change as
radically as they will in the near future, events which will make
sense then, in the future, will be very hard to put into terms
you could understand now. Another reason why predictions are
going to be more and more difficult is the influence of Uranus,
Aquarius' ruling planet. Its energy is so changeable that quite
possibly no one's predictions are going to come true for a while.
Not stock brokers', not systems analysts', not even psychics' --
except for the times when the predictions come true against all
previous logic. That is the Uranian energy: it tends to leave
everyone bewildered. Its influence is always a break away from
past structures, energies, and conservatism.
One of the ways these changes in your perceptions of cause
and effect is seen is in psychological growth: you are starting
to see yourselves as the cause of the experiences in your life.
You no longer see yourself as one of their effects. Many of you
are choosing to take your power back, instead of blaming another
for what is wrong in your life.
You are also releasing yourself from the structures of the
past, daring to say such things as, "Whatever was done to me by
my parents, or my life, or my family, it all ends here, it ends
with me. I will not pass it on to my children, or my friends, or
anyone else. When I was growing up I was told I 'made' someone
else feel one way or another. I see this now as false. No one can
'make' me feel. I choose to feel something because of my beliefs.
It is my responsibility to choose how I react to things, and to
approach life from the place of my own power. I will not accept
the guilt of those who insist that I am responsible for their
emotions. They are responsible for their work on their own
awakening, for their own limitations or choices. Nor can I put my
load on another for her to carry, either. And I no longer feel I
even have a right to remove someone's lessons by doing these
lessons 'for them.' They can choose responsibly, too."
You can see other ways the old ideas of how cause and effect
work are changing too: the Berlin Wall that could never fall,
has. Your worry and fear of the war with Iraq came to an
astonishingly sudden end for nearly all of you. You collectively
engaged in this war more consciously than any other, and yet it
seemed hardly a war at all. Some of you who were always so sure
before are beginning to feel bewildered about war itself. "Why
did we do this? Most of them didn't even want to fight. And some
of them hated us -- us, the good guys, the ones in the right --
as easily as we've hated others. Something's changed in the way
war has always been!"
Things are changing faster now, too. Scientific theories on
everything from cholesterol, to the nature of stars, to the
effects of Video Display Terminals are being made faster than the
media can tell about them. And then these same discoveries are
being overturned, then re-turned again, as though the objective
reality you're so convinced exists was playing tricks on you,
changing its face depending on who is looking at it!
The old ways just don't seem to work any more, and the new
ways are not yet in place. The Piscean influence is lessening.
The Piscean tendencies to emotionalism, psychism, sensitivity and
"escape" through addiction are being perceived clearly, and being
let go. The Piscean methods of hidden motives behind polished
exteriors, of secret controls, are being exposed. Its attitudes
of changeable despair and uncertain optimism are being
crystallized, and then released. Secret things, both dark and
light, are being pulled out of the watery caverns of the
subconscious, as though the fish in the Piscean symbol were being
hauled up suddenly on a new shore. What you once thought was
compassion -- usually only emotional sentimentality -- is taking
on a selfish air, and you do not yet know why. You can only
deplore the change. So many things which seemed to be so solid
suddenly look like airy illusions! The old Piscean changeableness
is becoming instead many strong, multi-directional pulls, like
the buffeting of a great wind in a ship's sails. Many of the old
concerns and considerations no longer seem to hold.
Some of you even feel almost dead, as though your emotions
are no longer working. Or -- is it that you are being forced into
a new quality of dispassion, a new emotional balance? Are you
finding a new equilibrium based on a clear separation between
yourself and others? Are you learning how your boundaries can
make you feel whole, no longer enmeshed? Are you learning how to
be solitary without being alone?
The hullabaloo of the New Age Circus is adding interest too,
as it rings in your ears. Even though you might hate the noise,
you still hope there's something in it, something new and
provable, not just occult and mystifying. So you embrace what you
can of the New Age, which you can hardly see yet. Some of you are
working with your minds, changing them like suits of clothes.
Some of you are weaving respect, regard, and simple friendship
for others into a great comforter that you want to cover the
planet with, and make war superfluous. These changes of mind can
be very exciting! Because if minds can change, they can agree.
Even they cannot agree after they have changed, they can at least
be understood, and you can work with something you understand
much more easily. You don't have to just automatically hate it.
As you change, your reality changes. Reality is, after all,
mostly just your perceptions of it, with a few agreements worked
out in advance so you can keep your appointments! But what are
you changing towards? What will the New Age be like?
One way to see ahead is consider the constellation of
Aquarius. The picture that goes with that group of stars is of a
person with an inexhaustible water jug on his shoulder, pouring
the water down to the earth. In many drawings, Aquarius has one
knee on the earth, with the other leg bent parallel to the
ground: the water is given freely, but from a stable position. It
flows from his shoulder, from the heart and head combined,
through the throat, the psychic center of communication. The
water Aquarius bears is the water of the spirit, the spiritual
blessing. The symbol of Aquarius is two parallel, wavy lines,
which represent waves.
But despite all this H2O, Aquarius is an air sign, the air
of the mental realm and the broad sweep of ideas. It is also a
fixed sign, tenacious, determined, and capable of great
integrity. It is a sign of unity, of the combination of opposites
into a whole. One of this Age's ideals is to have the head
(science, pragmatism, even materialism) work together with the
heart (intuition, compassion, and human strength). In the coming
Age science and the mental disciplines will study the depths of
the ocean and the depths of the subconscious with equal success.
Both will draw strength from the the other. The mind and the
intuition have been separate for centuries: now they may be made
whole again. Under the influence of Aquarius, the two fish of
Pisces, one open, one hidden, one "light," one "dark," can become
the Ocean Itself. Their two separate energies can become
coherent, like laser light, like the two waves in Aquarius'
symbol, separate but in tune. The divisveness of the Descartean
Age must change, becoming pluralism, which is unity without
conformity. Such are the holistic energies of the coming Age.
It may not help just to contemplate the symbol, though. The
astrological symbols that are most in use now work best for those
of Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian heritages, whose genes can
understand these symbols from the past. And a world tired of
worst-case Piscean tactics such as ulterior motives, false fronts
and "passing the buck" is not likely to be eager to embrace
energies as abrupt and quixotic as Aquarius' ruler, Uranus has.
Uranus rolls on its side in its orbit, as none of the inner or
outer planets do. In an astrological chart, Uranus often works in
defiance of all the other planets. (As ethereal and powerful as
Neptune and Pluto, the other outer planets, are, they spin
upright on their axes, like the Earth does, too, and cannot match
Uranus for creativity and invention.)
The ideals of the past Piscean Age have been good ones: the
ideals of compassion and self-sacrifice; the power of the hidden
word, of the secret wisdom, balanced by the hero's ideal of a
clean heart of open honesty. But there has always seemed to be a
lowest common denominator of these energies, too. At times the
ideals have degenerated into depths of degradation or despotism,
or just simple stupidity. Many people have seemed eager to fall
down to these levels -- the "base nature" of humankind which
caused the concept of original sin to be evolved. The original
Piscean ideal of compassion degraded into sentimentality. The
self-sacrifice degraded into martyrdom. The power of the secret
word, the secret wisdom, became manipulation by huge, secret
organizations which controlled you by hidden means. The hero's
clean courage became cynicism or ego-justification instead. As
the energy of the Piscean Age has fallen, so has its ideals.
So some of you are understandably cautious about the new
energies coming in. What about the ideals of the Aquarian Age?
What's to say that the independence of Aquarius won't just become
callous selfishness, which not only chooses not to care, but is
unable to care? The Aquarian curiosity and dispassion seems to
understand nothing about the usual human considerations. What is
there to say that the scientific, mental inquiry inspired by the
Age will not turn into cold-blooded experimentation? What will
keep Aquarius's broad humanitarian interests from degenerating
into yet another mega-bureauracracy, insensitive to everything
but itself?
Nothing but yourselves and your choices will keep the
original ideals and energy of the Aquarian Age from decaying. No
one but yourselves, kids. This is the Age's greatest challenge.
What to do? The paradox is that this is where the apparently
abrupt and chaotic energy of Uranus can best be used: to break
free of the old ways with the unexpected, instead of with force.
That's one of the reasons why this particular transition has been
so rough: the influence of Uranus never works on precedents. You
are already using the Aquarian energies to examine the hidden
things inside you, the hidden bits of the darker Piscean fish.
You are using these discoveries to decide to be free of what has
been before in spite of everything. You are learning to deal with
the present moment, not be motivated by the past. You will learn
how to deal with the person in front of you, and not the
projections of the ghosts of your pasts. You will decide to be
creative, rather than feel helpless and resentful. You can
continue to work for solutions instead of the victory of one
person, or one idea, or one force over another.
But you must choose, each one of you. It can all get much
worse than it is now -- it always can. When you stop dealing with
past ghosts, you can have your power in the present. But watch
out: you're still calling the shots! Are these the last days?
They will be, if we insist they must be. Will the Christ come
again? Well, would we notice? How much did we notice Him then,
really, and how much was just public relations, 300 years later?
What did you learn from His coming the last time? If you cannot
confront that living spirit inside yourself, how can you possibly
fully perceive it in anyone else? That spirit, the Guidance,
never dies nor leaves. Why would you want to be attached to one
specific form? Wouldn't that be like dying of thirst because the
river isn't brought to you in the one special cup you want to
drink from?
A story of the Christ has Him telling a man who has been
looking for Him his whole life: "Don't seek Me, seek what I
sought!" Because this will be another challenge: to seek, not
Him, but what He sought. To long for not yet another parent, not
yet another Teacher to lead you by the hand, but your own
self-determination, your own wisdom to choose. It takes a very
different skill to choose for yourself, than to be a follower.
Being a follower demands that you remove your power from your own
hands, however temporarily, to learn what another has. But these
are your challenges: choice, and the power that comes with it.
You must find the source and center of your light within
yourselves, instead of another, even the Christ as you knew him.
You will be challenged to take on responsibility, instead of
giving it to someone else. The choices will be many. As the
Aquarian influence begins to crystallize around the shards of the
past, there will be more psychic channeling, more interstellar
communication, more Berlin Walls coming down. And in all of this,
how could you find the old form of the Christ that you want to
recognize? He may look nothing like you, being black when you are
white, brown when you are black, yellow when you are red! Do you
really want to have Him come again, just as He was? Do you really
want to try the Piscean Age all over again, in the hopes of
getting it right this time? Do you really want to work all the
old energies through again, like you might try to relive your
childhood through your relationship with your spouse, in the
hopes of fixing the past? Well, you may. Or you can choose the
New this time.
There is another story, of a student who asked a guru, "Can
anyone travel the path without a teacher?" to which the teacher
replied, "Can you travel in a train without a ticket?" Everyone
laughed at how obvious that answer was. BUT -- when you are the
TRAIN CONDUCTOR, you do not need a ticket! You collect them! When
you are the engineer, you don't need a ticket, you get paid to
work on the train! And if you own the train, you could even take
all the tickets for yourself, or do away with tickets altogether.
You certainly don't need them to ride!
But being the conductor, or the engineer or even the cook
takes a great deal more care and concentration than just "going
along for the ride." Living a life that does not fall to the
lowest common denominator demands a great deal. You can't be
lazy, and throw people off your train just because it's easier to
think prejudicially than meet people "for real." Prejudice is a
lazy ego-habit, and the ego (that part of us which separates
itself from the whole into a state of not-love) always finds
something to judge. But this coming age will demand much growth.
You can't just do what you want to do, if you're the cook. You
can't just cook for yourself -- the folks riding the train are
going to get hungry. They may even break the door down and cook
your goose!
The influence of Aquarius is such that you can break free of
EVERYTHING. You can even break away from anarchy itself, from
revolution, from pain. You will certainly have to break away from
conservatism, bureaucracy and rigidity. This will frighten many.
It does not seem possible yet to have a government-sanctioned
institution which promotes everyone's individual tastes and
methods! It does not seem possible to make peoples' own trust of
themselves do away with laws and rules. How could you let a child
decide when she is an adult? How could you deny what is in front
of your eyes and say you are creating a new reality? But all
these things are and will be possible, and more.
All of these things are possible within the Aquarian
influence. Trust can replace laws, and be the only law, all at
the same time. Your individual choices, wisely selfish, can be
those things which most benefit the whole. Like the two waves of
the Aquarian symbol, paradoxes can become coherent with each
other, and thus become incredibly, incredibly strong.
But you can't leave this transformation much up to chance:
if it isn't you, now, there aren't going to be many other
opportunities. And paradoxes will bedevil you for quite a while
yet! Your best action may be inaction, until you can act from
within yourself, knowingly. Your best action might be to be
selfish, and no longer the self-sacrificing martyr you've been
trained to be. Your best action might be to learn what suits
yourself, instead of others. Then you can see where suiting
yourself suits the planet. Your best action may be to break with
everything you have ever known -- or to stand resolutely still,
and let the world move itself in chaos all around you. It may be
to care, care exquisitely, and prove it by letting someone else
flail around in his own mud till he sinks. It may be to care, to
care tremendously, and treat the thing or person in front of you
with perfect kindness.
As your creative powers have grown, and you abilities to
form your own realities have become greater and surer, you have
"upped your ante." So many of you are taking your own power now!
Yet often in the past, your wisdom has fallen short. You do the
easier thing, instead of the kinder. You choose the thing that
protects you, instead of what enriches you. You stay the same
instead of changing willingly. What is it that makes you act
unwisely? Is it fear that drives you to the lowest you can be? Is
it the original sin, theorized centuries ago? Entropy? Simple
lack of energy? (That is part of it.) What is it, really, that we
have been fighting all along, knowingly or not, this thing that
lets us fall into our worst, instead of allowing ourselves our
natural strengths and beauty?
Some of it is simple lack of energy. Not a lack of frantic
action, of which you have plenty in the Western world: your lives
swirl and change with such force you cannot hold them still, and
it all spins together like paint in a paint-pot. But in most of
Western culture there is almost no training in the use of energy
itself. You are not trained how to draw up your own natural
energy from within, instead of depending on a chemical or an
event or a person to bring it up. You do not know how to use what
you have. Your culture's use of natural energy is a bit like
making an eight-cylinder car use only two cylinders, and running
them like mad because you do not think to use the other six.
Some of the rest of the energy from within your selves gets
diverted into trying to make a poor fit between what you need
inside, what you know inside and what your inner intentions are,
and the expectations of your culture's training. It takes energy
to be empathic, to see the wider view -- prejudice is so easy
because it takes no extra energy. Just put in the judgment, and
don't change it. Whatever comes along, you don't have to work it
out again: you've already got it figured out! You don't have to
think any of your experiences through, this way, so it's very
easy. It takes energy to be perceptive of yourself and others; it
takes energy to get your own house in order so that you can
perceive clearly. It takes energy to swim against the prevailing
paradigms. It takes even greater amounts to swim true when the
swirls and counter-swirls of two Ages are meeting, like two great
oceans, and pulling up mud from the depths.
But there is another reason why we have fallen down to the
common denominator for so long, which is particular to these Ages
we are leaving and entering simultaneously: the fact that the
paradoxes, the opposing energies of the two Piscean fish, have
not yet been resolved. The Aquarian energy demands that those two
disparate energies be resolved. And resolved with acceptance, so
that several opposing things can be equally true at the same
time. Resolved with understanding, so that the leap is made
beyond the paradox into the solution, through the wider view,
through expanded perception. Resolved with growth, so that you
enfold what is in your reality, and you are not enfolded or
controlled by it, you are not trapped.
In order to live the ideals of the coming Age, you have to
grow up. In order to learn how to take energy in, and how to
spring it up from your own heart, you must mature. And you cannot
be afraid of your own splendor, because energy is the only way to
combat the laziness, which lets the ego speak and choose your
life for you. Splendor is the only way to outshine despair. Not
glitz, not anxious pretentions, advertising gimmicks or hoaxes --
but splendor, your own respect for yourself by yourself. This
kind of splendor is the recognition of your own light. And this
takes maturity, this takes growing up. This is what the Aquarian
Age is demanding of you.
For some the demand to mature will always come too soon.
Seen through the eyes of someone who never stopped being a
teen-ager, maturity seems unlimited license, and so to pretend
maturity many do as they will without considering consequences.
Only those who have accepted full responsibility know better.
Maturity seen through childish eyes can barely be perceived at
all. The child's state is to be egocentric: everything is seen in
relation to the child and its needs, period. In the childish
state empathy cannot be imagined, much less grasped. Maturity can
also be seen though the eyes of the fossils, the adults who never
grew up. They stand frozen in their sapling stage, hankering
after the brief light they knew in high school or college or when
they were 32. To these maturity is problematical and frequently
terrifying.
But you who are reaching for this change with your whole
selves intact will mature, like great trees or fine wines. It is
a most excellent opportunity! Yes, some will be "sour grapes" in
spite of everything, and turn into vinegar quickly, clamping down
hard on the new vibrations welling up from inside. Some of you
will cling back to the old Piscean ways tighter and tighter,
whether to a fundamentalist interpretation of Science, or of the
Bible, or to all the ways and means of power that "used to work,
dammit!"
Some will lose heart, through ego or fear, and rot into
mold, as for instance those who would rather have chemical
substances live their life for them, than live their life
themselves. Some will make themselves helpless by putting
someone, anyone, above them on the pedestal they should stand on
themselves. The pedestal you put another on is really your own
next step in your own growth. But if your own growth scares you,
then you can even remove yourselves from it so much that you
drink poison just because someone tells you in pretentious enough
tones, "It's time." Some of you will demand the license to be
negligent, others to be insensitive, others to be disengaged from
the living reality all around them.
(Though it may sound like it, there is no judgment here:
grapes are grapes, and people are people, and in the imperfect
system of manifest reality (which is incomplete) there is always
some loss in yield.)
And the tremendous forces which you can "tap into" now will
have their own toll. If you drive a car at a fast speed, and are
traveling at the same rate as the other cars, the situation can
seem quite static, even though great force is being used. But
then if there are some cars going at 60 miles an hour and others
going at 80, 20, 10 or 30 miles an hour, it is much harder to
travel unscathed! This is part of what is going on, with the call
to growth, the call to the next step of maturity which the
Aquarian energy is demanding now. You are all at such different
levels, all finishing up such different "projects" of growth,
that it's as though you were traveling at widely different
speeds, all on the same road.
Now, with this image in mind, imagine changing drivers while
you're moving, by exchanging the person in the front passenger
seat with the one who has been driving up till now. Now you have
an idea of what the transition from one age to another can be!
Yes, from this perspective, it is clear you're going to lose
a few, either species of animals, or people, or families, or
lands or perhaps even countries. Yes, in this perspective there
are rough times ahead, monetarily and emotionally as well as
physically. No one is going to be suddenly made over into a
saint! On the one hand, there is much too much momentum; on the
other hand there is much too much pull into the New. A lot of
"niceties" are going to have to be put aside for some time,
depending on how daring you are with your reality-creation. (If
you're going to change drivers when traveling at speed, you won't
have any time for friendly conversation!)
And yet the ability of the Uranian energy to change quickly
will be of much help in the coming ten years. Aquarian energy can
change gears in a millisecond. It can go forward by tangenting
off in three separate directions at once. It finds its center
always within itself whatever the direction, whatever the
impulse. This new energy will be felt more and more, and will
cause tremendous and startling changes in the midst of the
disintegration of the previous Age.
It will be a time of great invention. Now, a great deal of
invention happens "by mistake." So much is discovered through the
unexpected, the unforeseen! And that is Uranus' forte. Much will
be healed "by mistake," unexpectedly, in ways you cannot imagine
yet.
As the two Ages separate further, their separate kinds of
energies will become more and more apparent, like two different
kinds of light. They are mingled now, but they will be drawn
apart from each other. In time each will seem stranger and
stranger to the other. They will seem either less and less real,
or less and less acceptable. For a long while there may even be
"pockets" of "pure" forms of the one energy or the other. Their
differences will add even more to the feelings of imbalance, of
insecurity, in the world and in your lives.
But you are always free to choose, one energy or another --
or whether to participate in this drama of the Ages at all! There
will be a great many of you who will experience the turning of
the millennia as just another day, and a particularly mediocre
one, at that. You can choose not to get swept up into the
morality play. As I said earlier, even the Aquarian symbol is of
the Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian heritages, which comprise a much
smaller part of the worlds' experiences than you have sometimes
believed. Some of you might say that the coming Age will be a
time of the heyoka; some might say that the coming Age already
came, when the Aztec calendar counted itself down at the Harmonic
Convergence. Some will still be waiting through the entire
millennium!
You can accept the play, you can accept the new states and
stages this time is offering. But in order to take advantage of
this Uranian energy, of this adroit, illogical, and deceptively
arbitrary changeability, you will have to really understand your
true relationship to yourself. If you are the conductor of the
train, who doesn't need a "ticket," then you have to know who you
are. It won't really work the way it used to, before you grew up
a little, before you realized that it's your turn to drive. You
have to know what you have laid to rest, and what still lives of
the past. You have to know how to draw your own energy out of
yourself. You have to know how to change, and where your magic
is. You have to know your own courage and your own splendor; you
have to know your limits, and your needs. You have to know what
you love. You have to know where you care. You have to know your
own heart.
That is the first challenge. The second challenge is to
learn how to listen. The Uranian energy may seem chaotic, but it
is beyond any doubt directed from within, from a careful,
constant attention to the impulses from the Divine Center. Uranus
and Aquarius listen constantly to that voice which speaks softly,
but with such tremendous power. It is this sense of center which
allows Uranus to change in an instant; it will be this center
which will direct us through the coming changes easily, adroitly,
with a great degree of safety.
The third challenge will be to discriminate between the
tenacity of the fixed aspect of the sign of Aquarius, and
old-fashioned Piscean stubbornness. You will need to leave behind
the dreamy psychism of Pisces, and exchange it for the
sharp-cutting, dispassionate spirituality which Aquarius offers.
You must choose between living for others at the cost of
yourself, and living with others by honoring yourself. In short,
you will need to learn to tell which energy is which, and to keep
choosing between the two, constantly and joyfully.
OBEHON
... From "Spirit Speaks" magazine -- Obehon and Francesca
___ Blue Wave/QWK v2.12
--- GEcho 1.02+
* Origin: AWARENET INTERNATIONAL 1-303-377-1963 Denver,Co (111:111/0)